My life among elephants
The animals I grew up with still need our help, says Saba Douglas-Hamilton
Save The Elephants
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I grew up with elephants. These magnificent creatures were so deeply interwoven into my childhood and my family’s experience with them so intimate, that I often say I was baptised in elephant breath. My most vivid memories capture the most meaningful and terrifying of these moments – like being charged by the fiery matriarch, Boadicea; or the gentlest of them all, Virgo, reaching out her trunk to touch our hands in greeting.
My father, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, the founder of Save the Elephants, was a bit of a daredevil when he began his career as a researcher in Tanzania. His deep understanding of elephant behaviour allowed him to take risks that I wouldn’t recommend today! On our wild adventures with my younger sister, Mara Moon, we’d creep up behind an elephant bull and pluck out a tail-hair because it contained such useful data on its diet and foraging habits.
Sleeping under the stars and sharing our lives with elephants, we lived in a kind of paradise. I learnt so much. Elephants have vast reservoirs of memory and knowledge and each faces the challenges of life in their own way because of their unique personalities. They experience intense emotions like joy, love and grief, are hugely intelligent and family means everything as they rely on each other for love, safety and support.
But our family idyll didn’t last long. With the first big poaching epidemic for ivory sweeping across Africa in the 1970s and 80s, my father went from scientist to battle-hardened conservationist. As you will see in the wonderful documentary, A Life Among Elephants, he was the first person to fully understand how the growing demand for ivory threatened elephants.
There were several attempts to discredit him, but the data he collected proved that elephant populations were plummeting across Africa and alerted the world to the ivory crisis. This was pivotal to bringing about the 1989 international ivory trade ban that remains in place today and led to a 20-year reprieve from poaching.
My mission is for people and elephants to peacefully co-exist
Unfortunately, ivory poaching – the illegal killing of elephants for their tusks – kicked off again in 2008, driven by new demand in China and we feared that African elephants could be extinct in the wild within a decade.
A global coalition of conservationists fought to stop the killings, the trafficking and the demand for ivory. While it was already illegal to trade ivory internationally, in some countries an internal market continued. China, the US and the UK have now banned this domestic trade in ivory and poaching across Africa has dropped dramatically.
But many other threats to these beautiful creatures remain. A growing human population, extensive habitat loss and landscape fragmentation put elephants across Africa under immense pressure. Our main mission is to try to help people live better alongside elephants and move towards peaceful co-existence.
It’s not all bad news. Today, we’re on the cusp of developing a kind of portal into the minds of these wild creatures.
Collaborating with the Cornell Institute of Ornithology, Colorado State University, the Amboseli Trust for Elephants and ElephantVoices, we’ve been using AI to examine the infrasonic calls made by elephants and discovered that they have abstract names for one another. This is hugely exciting and one day, we could perhaps hear what elephants tell us about their world in their own language!
At the end of the day, their future in Africa will be decided by the people with whom they share the land. Their size makes them difficult to live with. A new generation of young African conservationists is leading the charge, earning PhDs, publishing data and finding tools to engage and co-exist better.
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But we need help from everyone to build an alliance for the wild. Wherever you live, you can get involved in conservation, whether it’s preserving elephants in their wild habitat or helping hedgehogs thrive in your own back garden. By taking steps together, we become a powerful force for change.
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